As a commercial photographer, one of the things that I'm entrusted with when a client hires me for a portrait is creating "The Look." Although sometimes hard to describe, just about everyone knows it when they see it. It's that persona, captured in two dimensions, that exudes confidence, trust, experience, and expertise. Instantly the viewer knows that the subject is serious about what they do, they are good at it and they can get the job done.

To that end, this summer I was hired by fellow EAA 690 member Larry King to create a portrait that he could use in his booth at the 2011 ICAS (International Council of Air Shows) Convention. It is the trade show for airshow pilots, and the main venue they use to speak with potential airshow organizers, and to book airshow dates for the coming year.

What follows is a somewhat technical outline of how the shot was created, and the considerations made in arriving at the final image. It's not meant to "obfuscate" as the boys on Car Talk humorously allude to, but rather to inform. There are a great many choices made during the course of a shoot, most in the blink of any eye (literally!). With experience, it becomes easier to quickly make the right choices.

Larry was lit using one Profoto strobe head, with a “beauty dish” light modifier. It’s a shallow, circular dish about 22 inches across that yields a beautiful soft light. Since it’s rigid, it works well in the wind, provided the stand/boom is well sandbagged. Power was provided by a Honda 2k generator, which allows great flexibility in using studio strobe gear just about anywhere, something I have long wanted to do. If memory serves, the power output was set in the 600 watt/second range.

The Canon 5D MKII camera was set at 1/200th of a second at F6.3, using ISO 100, with a Canon EF 24-70 2.8L USM lens, set at 27mm. The strobe was fired using a Pocket Wizard radio sync. The Pocket Wizards allow you to be separated from the strobe itself, up to several hundred feet if need be, without a hard wire connection. Plus they offer the added convenience of not having a wire to trip on, an added bonus I appreciate. I don’t recall the ambient light reading since I don’t use a meter much any more. After a test shot, I did look at the histogram on the camera back, which allowed me to see that I had an overall proper exposure. My experience told me that the strobe in the foreground was sufficient to separate Larry from the ambient light, which I wanted to do. Fortunately, the sun had just gone behind a cloud, rendering an overall flat light, which was accentuated by the strobe. My goal was to underexpose the background (ambient) light by a stop or so (50% darker), which allows the main subject to “stand out” against the slightly darker background.

As you can see, in the background there was an approaching storm, so I needed to work quickly. While it may have appeared to be a risky undertaking to have my gear out in deteriorating weather conditions, at no time were we threatened with lightening, which I was careful to watch for. I have no desire to be struck by lightening, and if necessary, would have thrown the gear into my nearby van to wait out the storm. This proved to be unnecessary.

Original, unprocessed file.

On the right is the original RAW file, which needed a lot of post-production work. While I have never been what could be considered a “Photoshop Guru”, I am increasingly interested in having my images match what I see in my head. Most of the work was actually done in Adobe's Lightroom, which I find much more intuitive than Photoshop.

Basic tonal corrections were made to increase the vibrance and contrast of the image, it was cropped, and the color was corrected. It’s hard to see here, but the eyes and teeth were “brightened” a bit. Several blemishes were removed on his face and hands (he’s an A&P too). Perhaps the biggest change was to “color” the grass and sky using the Color tool adjustment brush. Once a color is chosen, it’s a simple matter to then “paint” a color on a sky or other surface (the grass), with great control. Although not totally realistic in this instance, I wasn’t going for true realism, but for color contrast between the sky, the grass, and the bits of yellow in the image. About the only thing done in Photoshop was to remove the buildings in the background.

Since it’s an advertising image, I felt that I had a bit of creative license in crafting an image that wasn’t so literal. In the end, I was very happy with the image, even though Larry used another image from the shoot in his booth at the ICAS convention. He had never had a professional portrait done before and mentioned later that the image had a "huge impact", that it was "so far above my expectations" and that it was" just what was needed." He was "extremely pleased" and believes it was instrumental in allowing him to book four airshow performances for next season. Now that's results...